World Maker Faire's mixed bag of inventions

Lamebroghini

Developers from Sector67, a community engineering workspace from Madison, Wis., modified a Dexton battery-powered car and called it Lamebroghini. The belt-driven vehicle is water cooled and uses a brushless three-phase RC boat motor running on lithium polymer batteries. Built on an aluminum frame mostly from scooter and bicycle parts, the 50 lb. vehicle was created exclusively for World Maker Faire New York. The scale of Lamebroghini was small enough to let Sector67 put it in a suitcase and take it on a plane. Sector67 entered both Lamebroghini and Fauxrarri in the Power Racing Series, a competition for hacked electric cars. Fauxrarri won 1st place, giving Sector67 its second racing title in the competition it has dominated since 2012.

Make: Live Stage

Make Live, a series of workshops that were live streamed on the web, featured Seth Kane (a.k.a. Dr. Seth Adventure) of New Flesh Workshop discussing emerging technology in the prosthetics industry, such as hearing implants by Cochlear Ltd. and Med-El Power Solutions and an exoskeleton suit by Cyberdine Inc. Kane also talked about a couple of his own inventions, including a neural prosthetic suit for his grandfather coping with Parkinson’s disease, and a fingertip cover that fits attachments such as a screwdriver or a small flashlight for a friend who lost his pinky.

Mouse Trap

With Life Size Mouse Trap, a traveling troupe of artists recreated Milton Bradley’s iconic 1963 board game as a life-sized performance act. The mouse trap crew tours America in a semi-trailer, which transports 50,000 lb. of props, such as a crane, a few bathtubs, and a 2-ton safe. The scale of the performance is amazing and does not skimp on showmanship. Despite a few technical difficulties, the performance still managed to shock and awe.

Web shooter

Using everyday goods, a crafting booth welcomed kids (and their parents) to create items ranging from CD jewel cases to bubble wrap. With Halloween just a few weeks away, we were inspired to build our own Spider-Man web shooter with just these materials: a toilet paper tube; red, blue, and black pipe cleaner; blue plastic tubing; metal fasteners; red cellophane paper; blue and white mesh paper; and silver elastic. Drawing on a coffee filter creates the look of a spider web.

Microsoft's Boxing Bots

Microsoft Inc.’s Boxing Bots were as much of a showstopper as the Life Size Mouse Trap. The Channel 9 team of Microsoft employees built pneumatic robots that moved through the use of Kinect or an XBox controller. Off-the-shelf DeWalt air compressors pressurize the robot’s onboard tanks, which power the pneumatic actuators. This allowed the robots to box for about five 90-second rounds before being re-pressurized. Each robot had an onboard laptop, which communicated through Wi-Fi to two separate user consoles (both connected to an administrator console). The user consoles are Samsung display screens mounted with Microsoft’s Kinect. Kinect senses the player’s punches, and makes the robot reenact the player’s movement.

Windows 8.1

Microsoft also previewed its Windows 8.1 operating system, which will come pre-loaded with 3D Manufacturing Format, a 3D printing type of Extensible Markup Language (XML) used to encode files. XML data format is read by humans and machines. The software is plug and play. Once the design is ready, the end product will be as simple as File > Print. Windows 8.1 will be available October 17.

World Maker Faire, a two-day festival at New York’s Hall of Science (Queens, N.Y.), packed enough inventions and spectacles to live up to its title, “The Greatest Show (and Tell) on Earth.” Make: magazine’s annual event piqued the curiosity of kids through sights and sounds that might have once seemed unimaginable. However, there are just too many to list, so we’ve picked our top six things we saw at the World Maker Faire.